A.N

Yesterday, I shared the thoughts of a recent college grad who gave his reasons for abandoning affirmative consent. As he told it, women were more often frustrated by his deference than appreciative. He was most confounded by a woman who stopped his advances—he quickly listened—only to complain later that he wasn't more persistent. She was offering "token resistance," he thought, because while she wanted to hook up, she didn't want to be thought of as a slut. And while he didn't feel comfortable ignoring "token resistance," his perception of it helped sour him on affirmative consent. "One of my fondest sexual experiences started with making eye contact across a room, moved to a dance floor, and then to an empty bathroom," he offered by way of comparison. "Not a single word was ever spoken, because none had to be. We both knew and understood. I was a man and she was a woman, and we found ourselves drawn together in that beautiful way that men and women have been since a time immemorial, a time long before language was ever spoken."

That perspective is shared by an unknowable number of young men—enough, I think, that it represents an obstacle to spreading affirmative-consent culture. It also elicited some thought-provoking responses from other Atlantic readers.

One offered the young man insights gleaned from kink parties, arguing that what some regard as "natural" aspects of sexual culture are, upon reflection, not natural at all. Rather, they depend largely on the set of basic rules laid down:

I frequently attend kink parties whose rules prescribe affirmative consent for any physical contact. And the one thing I've never seen there is someone putting up token resistance and expecting it to be ignored. Everybody knows the rules, so somebody who says "hey, slow down" when they don't mean it—whether it's because of a reflex, or meant as flirtation (because yes, some people may do that), or any other reason—at least accepts that if they say no, they're responsible for having said it! This is not because everyone there is awesome or even well-intentioned; it's because saying "no" while meaning "yes" just won't work.

Your letter writer seems to fall into the trap of thinking that sexual norms are "natural," and that laws have to fit existing norms. But there's also a "traffic laws" element to sexual norms; declaring how people should interpret certain actions sets the meaning of those actions, even if they didn't have that meaning before.

"Token resistance" is a pretty dumb social norm for all kinds of reasons. You mention (as a possible response to the letter) that one might say some of the people who like it are rapists who appreciate the cover it gives them; while I think that's true, I also think there are plenty of women who expect to face social punishment if they don't follow this norm. My point is, those people are not going to necessarily go without sex if they live under affirmative-consent laws. They're going to say, "Hey, I guess if I say this, I'm not getting laid," and make their choice accordingly. (I think affirmative consent is a very good social norm but probably a terrible law. I hope I'm wrong about the second part.)

A female Stanford student posited that "token resistance" isn't a reason for men to abandon affirmative consent—it is a call to women to do their part to make it work:

This, to me, is exactly why women and men need California's new affirmative-consent law! It changes not just what we expect of men, but what we expect of women.

We are in the middle of a transition ... to a world in which sex is collaborative and wanted. But we haven't yet had the kind of cultural change that causes all individuals to rethink the new burdens that this standard places on them. For men, I think it lifts burdens. Judging by the stories you've shared, it hasn't lifted them yet. And this is where new expectations for women come in. I'm not suggesting that women no longer think sexual leadership is attractive, but that women assert their desires .... Playing a game where saying "no" or "wait" is a ploy to realign one's self-perception as a slut versus a prude merely reinforces the notion that women are two-dimensional Madonnas or Whores, or that women always want it. It's up to women to stop playing this game—to see asking as attractive, or if not, to ask for the more assertive behaviors they want, to see deference as respect, to reject the idea that the only option available to our gender is to wait passively for the act and when unwanted, say no.

I urge others, especially those sympathetic to your experiences, to see this change as a positive one simply because it relieves men's pressure to read minds. It relieves their grasp of all the power in a sexual encounter ... there's a big difference between assertiveness and assault, and it's not up to you alone to tread those waters.

The next correspondent is a somewhat unlikely supporter of California's law:

I am 27 and a recent law-school graduate.

I remember my first semester at law school in criminal law learning about an older study of college coeds at University of Texas. Around 75 percent had reported saying "no" to sex when they intended or wanted to have sex. In college, I rarely made the first move, and hearing this caused me to rethink my strategy. Assertiveness is clearly a desirable quality. Thereafter I began to be more bold but also conscious of body language and other signals. If a partner refuses initially, I pay close attention to whether she said, "I probably shouldn't," or unequivocally, "no." I sometimes test the "no," but will never cross the line to aggressive or pushy.

When I heard about California's new law, I thought back to our discussion of elements of rape and the previously mentioned study. My reaction was that this law is completely removed from the reality of modern dating and sets a potentially ridiculous standard for students to meet. However, I think ultimately it is positive.

Being assertive and recognizing body language are things that took me years to learn. This new standard will encourage partners to be more conscious of those small signals since consent may be nonverbal cues (like leaning in slightly when face to face versus cheating away [a stage term]).

• It will encourage women to be more open and assertive in their sex lives. (It is okay and does not make you a slut to say "yes," and saying "no" when meaning "yes" is confusing.)
• While the reality is that there will not always be explicit consent in adult relationships, college is different. The peer-pressured, alcohol-fueled hook-up culture (I went to Arizona State for undergrad, so not a total exaggeration) warrants greater emphasis on consent, even if that means missing potential hook-ups.

Remember, this is a standard to be implemented in disciplinary hearings, not a criminal statute, and holding college students and administrators to higher standards is understandable given their terrible track record. Students should remember that being assertive and confident does not preclude being respectful.

A male opponent of California's law writes:

If women want to be treated as equals—as they should be and as I do treat them—then it isn't too much to expect them to say "no" or "stop" if they don't like whatever a sexual partner is doing. If they say that one word, even once, it should be totally respected. If a man doesn't listen, that's rape, and he should be thrown in jail for years. But if those are the stakes, years behind bars probably getting raped, or in the current law getting expelled from college and branded a rapist, asking for a simple "no" or "stop" is not too much to ask.

The alternative is that some men will go to jail for misunderstandings or women who changed their minds after the fact. Of course men should ideally avoid even those situations, but how can I take women seriously as strong, independent equals if they infantilize themselves so much that they won't even take responsibility for saying no? If a man is threatening violence if she says no, even nonverbally, that's different. I'd vote for rape in those cases, but the standard should be, were any actions taken that would make a rational actor fear saying no? If not, then it shouldn't be rape even if there wasn't affirmative consent.

A woman explained why she opposes California's law, in part by sharing a harrowing experience:

My junior year of high school, a male "friend" stood between me and the door of an empty classroom. He asked for sex repeatedly, and I had repeatedly said no. When I attempted to leave, he stopped to "hug" me, tightly, and asked again. That time, I felt I could not get out of the room without fighting a fight I would likely not win, or giving up. I said yes—and although the experience left me with what my college psychologist would later call "symptoms of PTSD," under California's law, this would be considered consent ...

Her takeaway:

Requiring women say "yes" to demonstrate consent does nothing to help women for whom that "yes" was coerced or threatened.​ And women who gave "affirmative consent" under duress would have no legal recourse—their "yes" would be evidence against them.

She objected to "any law that uses a plaintiff's actions (or lack thereof) to determine the defendant's guilt" because it "necessarily places responsibility on the plaintiff to avoid being the victim of a crime—the jury tries the victim's responsibility, rather than the defendant's potential crime." What would she prefer?

The ideal policy would be sort of like a rational basis test for free will ... could the accuser rationally believe the defendant may legitimately harm them if consent is not given? In cases in which consent was not given and the accuser was harmed, the verdict should be obvious. In cases in which consent was given under psychologically questionable circumstances, this test would put pressure on the courts, or other evaluating bodies, to analyze the defendant's actions and the messages said actions could communicate. If these actions could reasonably communicate an intent to harm, then consent was not given freely.

Another woman looks back on college and explains why she didn't like giving affirmative consent:

Women don't want to be labeled sluts. Token resistance lets us dodge that question. I think what has bothered me about being asked for consent is I'm never really sure if I'm into it. So thinking about it makes me confused. I haven't been taught that it is okay to be into a guy, how to recognize if I'm attracted—all those things, I'm only thinking about now. So yeah, asking me if I want to can be difficult for me.

I replied, "If you're not really sure when asked for affirmative consent, do you think that means the standard is a good thing, and that those hookups ought to be stopped, or that it's a bad thing, because despite your uncertainty you want those experiences?"

She answered:

Basically, I think women need to separate sex from morality so that consent is positive and sexy for us, too. Some women can do it now, but those who can't are the ones fueling the idea of "token resistance." Hookups can be a very good thing, but they need to positively and spontaneously affirmed by both parties. Despite my uncertainty, I wanted those experiences, and the guy I was with took the time to verify that. It has been an exploration into how well I know my body, and it has been positive. The yes-means-yes law pushes everyone into that knowledge, because it is essentially the difference in the two ways of presenting the question "Do you want to receive further emails from the company?" when you buy something. Those emails mean more to the people who have to actually check yes, but they reach more people when they're automatically checked. They're just unwanted spam to most of them.

Does that make sense? I'm figuring out my ideas as I type.

A woman supportive of the law writes:

My partner and I don't just look for affirmative consent when interacting sexually, we actually still get verbal consent for a surprising amount of it. Four and a half years together, and we still don't have P-V sex without verbally checking in. The same is usually true for any kind of oral (if I'm leading into it slowly then sometimes I don't ask him, but I'm pretty sure he almost always asks). This isn't because we're scared of prosecution or anything, it's just what we do. It's normal for us. And no, it doesn't interrupt things. Talking about what you want to do to each other isn't what I'd call a turn-off!

To be fair, not everyone is the same as my partner and me, nor should they be. I've seen commentators who argue that the law is trying to dictate how we communicate, and I see why that would be a concern if it were true. I think it would be more true to say that the law is dictating that we communicate, in some way, which doesn't have to be verbal. That seems pretty defensible to me.

I'm receptive to the idea that we need cultural change as much as or more than we need a legal change. The moral principle is easy to articulate, right?  Every sexually active person has a moral responsibility to not have sex with anyone who does not want to be having sex with them.  Back when I was hooking up with different guys, rather than being in a relationship, I can't say that seemed like an excessively difficult principle. I'm okay with the principle that, in order to keep their college enrollment, students have to make a good faith effort not to have sex with people who don't actively want to be having sex with them.

A professor at a prestigious institution of higher learning in the Northeast writes:

To live or work in academia and openly express that young man’s perspective is to take a risk, especially if you’re a straight male. If you do, you’re practically begging to be made into a negative example. You just have to hope that women who understand the truth that guy is expressing will say it for you. When the sexual-safety-training session takes place—and this goes for male students and instructors alike—it’s best to say whatever the session’s leaders want to hear.  

If you push back on their often one-sided and politically driven views of human sexual response, you can easily be branded a conservative, a sexist, a misogynist, or even a potential rapist who needs to be monitored. (Although I hate to confirm a Fox News talking point, “conservative” is indeed a damaging slur at far too many universities.) Those of us who hope to discuss this subject honestly are caught between the psychopaths who tweet misogynist and violent garbage and the Judith Butler wannabes who use all manner of bullying and demagoguery in an attempt to—this is not an overstatement—silence male voices in the academy.

(Meet Cathy Young.)

Finally, a female student writes:

In all of my sexual experiences, I have never been asked for permission nor have I had to ask someone for permission. It has been clear and obvious that we were both interested. I have been in experiences that were not consensual. I know what enthusiastic consent looks like because I have not given it before. I don't think that excludes men from knowing what it looks like—they have given enthusiastic consent before. And they have also not given it.

Anonymous seems perplexed … as if by discovering that some women don't like to be asked for permission every step of the way, that means the only alternative is … what? Not clearly defining consent? Not getting laid? Eschewing his feminist upbringing because one woman suggested that she would like to be ravaged? I have never been that confused during sex .... I have never been unsure about what comes next or when it needs to continue or stop. And I don't think that means I am lucky or extra insightful. It means that I am capable of thinking one level deeper than Anonymous appears to be about humans.

Can't I like confident men in the same way that men like confident women? I feel like this sort of this defines the non-problem that Anonymous is bringing up. Confident doesn't mean rapey. Not asking for permission doesn't mean rapey. It is possible to be all of those things—passionate, spontaneous, aggressive, raw–without raping someone, or assaulting someone. I wish I could say I sympathize with Anonymous' confusion on this topic, but I just don't. Perhaps if you can't figure it out, then you just shouldn't be having sex.

More correspondence on this subject is welcome (conor@theatlantic.com), but let's move past directly responding to the letter that inspired this string of responses.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/the-traffic-laws-of-sexual-culture/381704/

In pregnancy, women are shape-shifters, their bellies waxing like the moon. After delivery, they hold another kind of magic: microchimerism, a condition in which women harbor cells that originated in their children even decades after birth.

The name, born from Greek myth, refers to the chimera, a fire-breathing lioness with the head of a goat rising up from her body and the tail of a serpent. In ancient mythology, the chimera was an omen of storms and natural disasters. Just what microchimerism foretells still isn’t clear, but a recent study in the International Journal of Epidemiology suggests that these cells may substantially improve the health of the women who house them.

In research published earlier this year, epidemiologists analyzed the data from a previous longitudinal study of 272 elderly Danish women. Out of that group, 70 percent had Y sex chromosomes in their blood, a sign of the presence of male cells.

Although cardiovascular disease was slightly elevated among women with male microchimerism, their overall mortality rate was a whopping 60 percent lower, primarily because of a lower incidence of cancer. Eight-five percent of these women made it to age 80, compared to 67 percent of women without the presence of these cells.

Scientists don’t know for certain what biological mechanisms cause these findings, but past research suggests microchimerism may boost immune surveillance—that is, the body’s ability to recognize and destroy pathogens and cells that might become cancerous—and also play a role in the repair of damaged tissue, helping form new blood vessels to heal wounds. Microchimerism is also associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer.

These fetal cells migrate all over a mother’s body, becoming part of the heart, the brain, and blood—and fascinating scientist and artists alike. Writer Sarah Gerkensmeyer, mother of two sons, says she likes to think that they never completely left her, and that microchimerism from her younger son Charlie, born in 2011, helped give rise to her short story collection.

“When I was pregnant with him, those weird stories were in me, washing around and fusing together right alongside my developing son,” she wrote last year. “It’s a nice, strange thought, isn’t it? That he gave me those stories to tell.”

Some journalists have asked if the presence of male cells can cause women to think differently, said Mads Kamper-Jørgensen, an associate professor of public health at the University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the International Journal of Epidemiology study.

The answer: No. He also noted that the health benefits of microchimerism are the same whether the cells are male or female. “Sons aren’t any better than daughters.”

The reason why much of the research has focused on microchimerism stemming from males, he explained, is because of the ease in measurement. In blood samples, male Y chromosomes stand out among a woman’s XX. By comparison, finding a daughter’s genetically distinct cells in a mother is expensive and difficult because the chromosomes are all XX. Detecting microchimerism in men is also a challenge, because the female X chromosomes are hard to differentiate from the male XY. (Microchimerism is probably more frequent in women, because pregnancy is a natural avenue for transferring cells, but individuals may also pick up genetically distinct DNA after an organ transplant or transfusions, or in utero if they had a twin.)

A 2004 study found the presence of male genes in 21 percent of women overall—even among those who had only given birth to daughters, had a miscarriage, underwent an abortion, or had never been pregnant. Researchers speculate the unknown DNA could have come from a miscarriage these women never recognized, or from an older brother who transferred cells to their mother, who in turn passed the genes onto subsequent children. Or—here’s where the science starts to feel like sci-fi—women could have picked it up through sexual intercourse, traces of past lovers never lost.

Though the idea is intriguing, it’s also “sort of impossible” to study, Kamper-Jørgensen said, because of the intimate details participants would have to agree to share, and the testing that would have to begin even before women have sexual intercourse and after each new partner.

Kamper-Jørgensen’s current research focuses on preeclampsia, a condition involving elevated blood pressure in pregnancy that causes a higher exchange of cells between fetus and mother, and its association with breast cancer. He’s also investigating the association between microchimersim and allergies in women; those with more children tend to have fewer allergies compared to those who don’t. In another study, he plans to examine microchimerism and its association with rates of brain, cervical, and lung cancer.

“There’s so much [epidemiological] observation out there,” Kamper-Jørgensen said. “Having kids protects you from breast cancer, but we don’t really know why. If you have kids, you live longer, but we don’t really know why. Women live longer than men, but we don’t know why. This phenomenon, this may be it.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/your-babys-leftover-dna-is-making-you-stronger/381140/

by John Herrman

All around the country, parents are sitting down to have the talk with their children. Not about sex or mortality or college. They're having the talk about Gamergate. From our own comments:

I have a 17 year old son and trying to point out the actual facts in this story is like trying to convince a rabid 70 year old FOX viewer that Obama is not a terrorist, born on Mars, here to take your guns.
"It's about ethics, mom. Don't you care about ETHICS?"

He's not down with the death threats though, so I guess Yay?

Imagine! You hear your child talking animatedly about something. He steps closer and you hear him say "bias" and "Sarkeesian." The words drip with spite. Later, you hear him through the bedroom door, talking to his webcam: "No, it's about corruption in games journalism!" What do you do?

This is not an isolated phenomenon. On Metafilter:

My son is 19, with mild ASD. Sometime in the last 2 years he discovered 4chan. At first he was just reading /co, but now he is almost addicted to /pol and /v. Before he went back to college he was constantly online, getting all worked up about Zoe Quinn and gamergate.

I raised him to be a feminist, a liberal and a kind person. It hurts me that he is involved with such sexist, racist, anti-Semitic people. I don't even have the words to express how sad this makes me.

Because he is 19, he of course knows more than me. I'm just his ignorant mom. So I don't even know how to approach this conversation. What do I say that won't just make him dig his heels in more?

Here's what it looks like from the other side. From Reddit:

My dad and I got into an argument about #GamerGate today. He said I need to try and see the other side's point of view. But that's the problem. They haven't, they've just sat back and called us White Cis Heterosexual Male Misogynists. (BTW, if you do have a legitimate argument about #GamerGate that won't simply devolve into cries of sexism for "cries of sexism"'s sake I [and several others, I'm sure] would love to hear them)

But the problem with arguing about #GamerGate with someone that isn't a gamer, is they don't truly understand what this experience puts the whole gaming community through.

We started #GamerGate with a simple request. Give us some f-ing integrity with your reporting. Don't suck up to developers, over-hyping video games that couldn't live up to the impossibly high standards you set them to (See Watch_Dogs and Destiny) Were they bad games? Not really, but they didn't deserve as much of the hype that they received.

But my dad will insist that I need to show some respect for the other side's opinion. So I simply ask to those who oppose #GamerGate, "Besides feeding the trolls of the internet attempting to sabotage a movement with good intentions, why would you oppose a call for ethics in gaming journalism?"

And:

I actually talked to my dad about this, and he looked at me funny. Not because he thought I was wrong, or that we were in the wrong, but I don't think me explaining the opposition made absolutely any sense to him.

Some parents are attempting to engage in earnest:

He likes to think that the GGrs are benign heroes who are "misunderstood". Um, I think not. I've sent him two new links. BOOM. Take that!

— Michele Mills (@mills_michele) October 12, 2014

@Palaxar What other side?How can there be nuance if there are threats of violence?Though I TOTALLY understand that not ALL gamers hate women

— DougalsBeard (@DougalsBeard) October 16, 2014

@Palaxar I appreciate the dialogue! My son is a gamer and I want him to have open eyes about all good and bad about the community…

— DougalsBeard (@DougalsBeard) October 16, 2014

And a few parents are trying to preempt things entirely:

@moryan I was just trying to explain it all to my 11YO gamer son, but it's hard to make it not sound INSANE

— Matt Mitovich (@MattMitovich) October 15, 2014

Received a text from my fourteen year old son " What's gamer gate?" What the hell do I say here?

— Ross Ireland (@R_J_I) October 15, 2014

I want to give context and not just drop " they're bad" but the depths of it is noxious. How do I explain it to a kid?

— Ross Ireland (@R_J_I) October 15, 2014

But then there's the other type of Gamergate parent. The MOVEMENT parent:

I told my son about what SJWs want to do to games His response "but that won't make games fun then" Priceless from an 11 Year old #gamergate

— Beelzs Zabub (@BeelzsZabub) September 26, 2014

@daveweigel My son the "gamer" is learning the true nature of the American "news" industry earlier than most people do thanks to this story.

— Ballistic Prince (@BallisticPrince) October 15, 2014

There are some self-described moderates of course:

I'm a gamer, I'm not ashamed of calling myself that and I take offense at the notion that I should. I've been playing video games for more than 30 years, been a game developer for more than 10. I'm enjoying playing video game with my son and I'm looking forward to be playing them with my soon to be born daughter. I refuse to be held accountable for the actions of others.

I'm a left leaning liberal and I fully support GamerGate.

There are proud parents demonstrating solidarity with their Gamergate kids:

My son is following it and is outraged enough for our whole family. It's probably justified too as people may well have based spending decisions on biased information.

There are parents cautiously expressing concern:

@jamesmelay @Boogie2988 My son is a 15 y/o gamer (and fan of Boogie's) and I am hoping that this doesn't effect his identity negatively.

— Vance (@VanceMc14) October 14, 2014

It's October, 2014. Do you know which side of Gamergate your child is on?

Image by Flightsaber

0 Comments

For his birthday, Ezra asked for exactly four things:

1) A chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

2) A Lord Business LEGO set.

3) A very specific Transformer that oh God I hope I bought the correct one THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE.

and

4) A party dress for Bloon. 

So we took a recent scouting trip to a Big Box Toy Store — the POINT of which was to figure out exactly which Transformer he was talking about, which I completely blanked on while scrolling through Amazon because THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE and there are fourteen million variations of the same robot and now I'm utterly amazed at my parents' ability to always get me the exact pose of Strawberry Shortcake I had my heart set on.

"The Strawberry Shortcake with the watering can! The GREEN watering can. And not the BENDING DOWN one. The STANDING UP one."

While we were there, I figured Ezra might want to have a say in Bloon's party dress selection as well, so after some disoriented wandering around in search of the doll aisle, I asked an employee where we might find doll clothes.

"Like for [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF]?" he asked.

"Um, I dunno," I answered. "It's for his bear. I don't know what brand will fit, so is there just an aisle we could look at?"

"All we really have is [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF], but it's, you know. For girls."

"Well," I bristled, hoping that Ezra didn't hear that, because NOPE. "His bear is a girl."

"Oh, okay," he laughed and started walking away. We trailed after him, until I realized he was just walking towards the employees-only area of the store.

I asked again where we might find those doll clothes, please. He looked surprised, then gave us the aisle number and general direction.

It turned out that the clothing for [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF] was perfectly Bloon sized. Ezra very seriously considered each option, pointedly turning down anything blue or gender neutral.

"That's not beautiful enough," he explained.

He chose this. 

Isn't she beautiful? 

Just like Ezra, my beautiful, amazing boy. He's Transformers and Plastic Battle Droidpod Whatevers and Dirt and Defiance and Stubbornness and the most loving, gentle, and nurturing little person I have every had the honor to meet. 

I started his birthday video the usual way, set to some song that he loves or was just the right blend of sappy/peppy, before realizing that...no. He doesn't need a soundtrack anymore. The one he provides — his singing, dancing, talking — is a better representation of life with Ezra this year than any old rapid-fire clip montage ever could.

Ezra's 6th Birthday from amalah on Vimeo.

Happy birthday to the Mightiest of Zahs. 

While jogging near his home in San Mateo County, California, Gary Hesterberg, a 50-year-old electrician, felt sharp metal barbs strike him in the back. He fell forward, his face hitting broken asphalt, as thousands of volts of electricity surged through him. The current caused his nervous system to fail and his muscles to seize. He lay on the ground, momentarily paralyzed, in pain he later described as the most intense he'd felt, worse than breaking his collar bone or having his hips replaced. Due to a heart condition, he feared he would die as he writhed on the ground.

The person who propelled steel-tipped barbs into his back at 160-feet-per-second, sending 5 seconds of electric current through his body, was not a deranged serial killer, or a robber, or a romantic partner's jealous ex. It was Sarah Cavallaro, a Park Ranger patrolling the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She deployed her taser in the jogger's back to stop him from leaving a crime scene:

He'd been jogging with his rat-terrier off leash.

Tasers have been purchased for law enforcement agencies all over the United States by policymakers who imagined that they'd facilitate protecting the public with less force. Their rise has instead led to an epidemic of cases–a sample are on YouTube*–where officers deploy the debilitating weapon in instances they regard as justified, but that strike many citizen observers as unjustified, draconian and immoral. Officers in these cases appear to believe that they're justified in brutally electrocuting anyone who disobeys them, even if the person poses no danger to the public.

In Gary Hesterberg vs. United States of America, a civil rights lawsuit filed by the electrician, who sought damages for his treatment at the hands of the National Park Service, and litigated by Haddad & Sherwin, Oakland-based civil rights trial lawyers, the federal government explicitly defended the notion that it is permissible to Tase an unarmed citizen in the back while enforcing something as trivial as an off-leash violation (in a wilderness area where off-leash dogs were tolerated for years). During testimony, Hunter Bailey, the Deputy Chief of Law Enforcement for the National Park Service, maintained that a Park Ranger would be legally justified in Tasing even "a 9-year-old girl" or "a pregnant woman" if they were caught walking a dog off-leash and tried to leave the scene against a ranger's orders. This institutional mindset leads directly to violent civil rights violations, as a federal court ultimately ruled in this important litigation. The National Park Service now owes the jogger that they victimized $50,000 in damages. And law enforcement is on notice that the Constitution forbids tasing so needlessly.

* * *

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/modest-limits-on-when-the-state-can-electrocute-americans/381458/

In a recent debate with a CNN contributor, the conservative radio talk-show host Larry Elder declared that “if black America were a country, it would be the 15th-wealthiest country in the world.” His math proved incorrect, and his invocation of “black America” was followed by a refutation of the concept by a fellow black conservative. Shortly after Elder’s remarks, the Republican strategist Ron Christie argued that there is no such thing as ‘black America’ and, further, that the very notion of it is antithetical “to our national motto of E Pluribus Unum.”

Whether these men know it or not, they are continuing a debate that W.E.B. Du Bois gave voice to 80 years ago in his resignation speech from the NAACP. In a farewell address titled, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” Du Bois asserted:

The peculiar position of Negroes in America offers an opportunity. … With the use of their political power, their power as consumers, and their brainpower … Negroes can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation ...

Though Du Bois eventually took an extreme turn toward communism and emigrated to Ghana, the goal of “fellowship and equality in the United States” remained his burning desire. As for the belief that black America is an immense, multifaceted asset to the United States, his instincts were right: Black Americans boast enormous capital that has been exploited over the course of the nation’s history and has yet to be fairly and fully employed to increase prosperity for all Americans.

This decades-old conversation invites a thought experiment: If black America were a nation-state, how would it stack up against other countries? How would it fare on standard measures of national power and weakness?

Naturally, this exercise presumes a monolithic black America, but this is a standard hazard when comparing large entities using statistical medians and per-capita rates. Another obvious concern is that a sub-national, racial demographic is not equivalent to a sovereign nation. Nearly all the sources of black America’s attributes are grounded in America’s history, economy, geography, and government structures. Still, it is this truism that gives weight to the insight revealed by the following charts: Black America is a fragile state embedded in the greatest superpower the world has ever known.

In the infographics below, two pictures emerge. The first is of a strong nation with considerable manpower and purchasing power. The second is of a troubled, fragile state suffering from socioeconomic disparities and structural subjugation in ways that degrade life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (on some measures, black America resembles countries like Brazil, China, and Russia—emerging powers that are struggling with stark economic inequality). Essentially, what we're witnessing is a nation that is comparable in certain ways to a regional power existing in the state of Disparistan (or, perhaps, Despairistan). This is more than an inconvenient truth; it fundamentally undermines the United States’ greatest contribution to humanity: the American idea.

The statistics tell the story.

---

---

---

---

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/what-if-black-america-were-a-country/380953/

I was born in 1971, and came of age watching soap operas. This was pre-Internet, before gay marriage was even a thought, when homosexuality was still a mental disorder in the DSM. When I remember back, the only images I can recall of LGBT people on TV involved people who were white and showed up only to hang themselves, or be runaway hustlers, or die slowly of AIDS, with their mothers crying at their bedside and their fathers brooding silently in hospital hallways.

I’ve been writing and publishing for over 25 years and long ago I bitterly “accepted” I’d never make a living solely as a writer. I hadn’t even made one-hundredth of my living as a writer, yet I trudged on with my little stories, all but sewing them into booklets in my bedroom à la Emily Dickinson.

When I did get the rare opportunity to be paid well for my writing, I had to completely edit out my life as a butch dyke to make it palatable/publishable to the outside world—or so was the expectation of nervous editors. And after so many years of just doing my own thing, I just trudged on, writing my novels and hosting an annual writers’ retreat in Mexico with RADAR Productions, a San Francisco literary non-profit. I met Transparent creator Jill Soloway when she attended one year.

I’d seen Jill a few times at readings after that but I had no idea she was even familiar with my work. So I was surprised and excited when she wrote to me and said, “Have you ever thought of writing for TV?”

Why, no I hadn’t. I was entering my seventh year as a cashier at a grocery co-op because after many different jobs and life configurations the co-op best suited my life as a writer. It gave my girlfriend and me health insurance and allowed me the most freedom to travel when I needed to.

“There’s like four shows coming out with trans content this year,” Jill said, when she first contacted me. One of those shows was her creation, Transparent, a dramedy that centers around an affluent Los Angeles family and their lives following the discovery that their father, whom they’d known as Mort, is a transgender woman named Maura.

I wanted to get it right, and recognized the dangers of a bad representation. I’ve lived a good part of my life in a gender-nonconforming body. As a butch who is constantly misgendered and regendered throughout the day by strangers, I have some crossover with a trans experience—especially when it comes to using public restrooms, navigating airports, getting wanded by security detail on entering a sporting event. So I felt like I could use my experience to add to the conversation. 

I’d never counted how many of my friends were trans, because why would I, they were just my friends. And my friends’ histories were as diverse as the breadth of genderqueer and trans’ characters on the show: trans men, trans women. On hormones. Not on hormones. Electing surgeries or not. Early, middle, and late transitioners. Concerned with passing or not passing. And while Jill is not trans herself, I knew she was personally invested in trans visibility, as her parent had recently come out to her as transgender. Plus, the time was right: Laverne Cox’s character, Sophia Burset, on Orange Is the New Black had set a new precedent for respectable depictions of transgender characters on TV.

As I sat in the writers’ room, it was apparent right away that Jill was committed to telling a trans story with integrity. Trans artists Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker acted as consultants for the show. We also had other trans folks visit the room to help us get it right; including Ian Harvie, Jenny Boylan, and Van Barnes.

Jill Soloway told the writers to think about what we’d never seen on TV before but wanted to.

I’d lived long enough to see the never-seen gays and lesbians on TV, now peppering every show, but these “gay” characters often felt dispersed as a kind of diabolical diversity seasoning salt. I have never seen anyone who looked like me represented on TV, but thanks to Jill allowing the writers to have some cameos, I will appear as a butch security guard named Tiffany. Take that!

Jill Soloway said during the last week of shooting that the world probably needs a trans 101 show and that Transparent is more like trans 507. It isn’t a show that spoon feeds the definition of trans to the audience. Instead, we present a spectrum of trans characters to choose from: a butch, a transman, two transwomen, and Maura, a transwoman at the beginning of her transition who may or may not “medically” transition. I knew besides Sophia Burcet, the trans community had only seen themselves portrayed as victims or villains.

We were committed to doing so much more.

Can a TV show save lives? Can cisgender actor Jeffrey Tambor be enough of a first stepping stone for transwomen who’ve waited forever for any kind of representation? Could a transphobe somewhere see this show and feel something shift? With four new shows with trans content, will cisgender people pepper their scripts with trans characters to sell scripts? The thought of that makes me want to crawl back in bed.

From day one, I realized I had a unique responsibility as a queer, gender-nonconforming writer working on a big television show. I owe it to my community. I hope that this show can not only give trans people positive visibility that will therefore make them safer in the bigger world, and more employable, and able to walk through the streets without the terror of violence. I want for trans people what I want for everyone: a fair living wage, health care, the absence of loneliness, freedom from addiction, a lemon tree in the front yard, and a TV show that they really love to watch.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/tv-shows-save-lives/380855/

Yearbook

chapmangamo:

Translated TV Shows

"You know, Dave," Chicago children's entertainer Pogo reportedly said over dinner with two cops who'd been tailing him, "clowns can get away with murder." Pogo would know, because outside of his clown identity he was John Wayne Gacy, the notorious 1970s serial killer and maybe one of the worst things to happen to clowns since the 1892 opera Pagliacci.

Clowns, it's fair to say, are not currently having the best time of it, PR-wise. The fourth season of American Horror Story, which debuted Wednesday, features Twisty the Clown as the primary antagonist: a terrifying perversion of the profession with a mask of grinning, oversized teeth and distorted black lips. In the opening episode, Twisty bounds up to a young couple in broad daylight, knocks them both out with juggling clubs, stabs the young man over and over again, kidnaps the woman and locks her up with a young boy in a decrepit old school bus, and forces them both to watch him craft balloon animals (there being clearly no limits to his malevolence).

In addition to this new incarnation of the monstrous, murdering clown trope, rogue scary clowns have been spotted recently stalking the streets of Wasco, California. In July, a "creepy" clown wearing a red wig and clutching a handful of pink balloons was sighted walking through Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. The professional clown industry, for once, isn't smiling. Membership of the World Clown Association, a U.S.-based trade group for performers, has fallen from 3,500 to 2,500 over the last 10 years. In the UK, a similar group, Clown International, has lost almost 90 percent of its members from its peak in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Butlin's holiday camp, in the popular destination of Bognor Regis, withdrew its annual offer to sponsor the group's annual gathering thanks to a decline in overall clown approval ratings.

How, exactly, did clowns go from lovable children's entertainers to the bewigged, bone-chilling incarnation of evil? The answer is complicated, and spans a period of almost 200 years, even if the current trend of coulrophobia seems to have peaked with the ascent of online media.

Traditionally clowns are anarchic figures who defy the boundaries of normal social conduct, even before Heath Ledger's Joker just wanted to watch the world burn. In Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 story Hop-Frog, a physically deformed court jester who's consistently the butt of practical jokes encourages the king and his court of noblemen to dress as orangutans covered in tar, at which point he sets them all on fire. The unpredictable nature of a clown's behavior, and his or her tendency to transgress acceptable standards of behavior (by, for example, throwing pies in each others' faces, or squirting water on an innocent bystander with a trick buttonhole flower), probably makes us wary of what other lines they might cross.

The makeup, too, is a factor. Traditional clown face paint—a white base, with exaggerated red lips and cheeks—was pioneered by Joseph Grimaldi, a popular entertainer in the early 19th century, and can be manipulated to create a face that is either grinning in an absurd rictus or tragicomically sad. "At its roots, clownaphobia springs from the duplicity implied by the frozen grins and false gaiety of clowns," writes cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1999 book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: America on the Brink. "The clown persona protests too much; its transparent artificiality constantly directs our attention to what's behind the mask." The frozen smile of a clown makes his or her true expression impossible to read—yet another factor that leads us to ponder whether or not they can be trusted.

Despite all this, clowns were typically viewed in a positive light for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, even though Leoncavallo's aforementioned 1892 opera, Pagliacci, told the story of a clown who murders his unfaithful wife and her lover with a knife. (Se il viso è pallido, è di vergogna, the clown sings, or, If my face is white, it is for shame.) The turning point, culture-wise, appears to have been the arrest of Gacy, dubbed "the Killer Clown" by the media, whose grisly string of sexual assaults and murders contrasted so vividly with his alternate clown persona. As Pogo, Gacy performed at parades, parties, and charitable events, even meeting First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1978 thanks to his role as director of Chicago's Polish Constitution Day Parade. While on death row, he painted a number of portraits of clowns, many depicting himself as Pogo, claiming that he wanted to use the paintings "to bring joy into people's lives."

The national shockwave following the exposure of one of the most prolific serial killers in American history may have forever traumatized the country as far as clowns were concerned. In 1980, Gacy was sentenced to death. Two years later, Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg released Poltergeist, a movie in which evil forces terrorize a household, in part by bringing young Robbie's Clown Doll to life and having it pull him under his bed and attempt to throttle him to death. In 1986, Stephen King published IT, a horror novel about the murderous Pennywise the Clown, who stalks children, terrifying them and occasionally ripping off their limbs. In 2009, King talked about the idea for Pennywise with Conan O'Brien. "As a kid, going to the circus, it'd be like 12 full-grown people piling out of a little car, their faces were dead-white, their mouths were red, as though they were full of blood," he said. "They were all screaming, their eyes were huge: What's not to like?"

Pennywise, as played so memorably by Tim Curry in the 1990 television movie of IT, emerged shortly after Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 movie, Batman. The Joker, at least in comic books, has always seemed to occupy an odd space between jester, clown, and harlequin, but Nicholson's depiction felt deliberately clown-like, both in his pockets full of tricks (the flower filled with acid instead of water), and the way he used poison gas to give his victims pallid white skin and distorted scarlet smirks. Ledger's Joker, coming almost two decades later in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, was more explicitly wearing surreal makeup to enhance his scarred Chelsea grin: less Bozo, and more Insane Clown Posse.

Can clowns be saved? At this point, given their popularity as fright masks, the rise of coulrophobia, and the decline of the wholesome, apple-pie birthday party, it’s hard to see a future for clown acts outside of the circus (which itself is suffering thanks to the impossible dominance of the global juggernaut that is Cirque du Soleil). There is some hope: Even though studies in the past have typically shown that children fear clowns, research conducted at Tel Aviv University this year found that children undergoing allergy testing were less anxious when a clown was present in the room. Maybe the future for clowns is less about Ronald McDonald (nothing’s scarier than diabetes, after all) and more about distracting nervous patients from the giant needles injecting allergens into their skin.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/how-clowns-became-terrifying/381306/

There is no political topic that makes the Clinton administration seem like ancient history more than gay rights.

Friday's release of a trove of White House papers from the Clinton library, coming at the conclusion of a week in which a pair of court decisions cleared the way for legal same-sex marriage in another dozen states, depicts the last Democratic presidency as even more of a relic.

The big debate at the start of Bill Clinton's first term was whether the new president would order the military to end its long-standing policy banning gays, and amid a bipartisan backlash, Clinton struck a compromise resulting in the policy–now infamous in some quarters–of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Among some 10,000 pages of documents that were posted online were hundreds of pages of legal memos on the proposed policy, as senior officials in the Justice Department weighed whether the new protocol would withstand legal challenges.

The documents also include 34 eye-opening pages of handwritten notes from a White House meeting during the first days of the administration in which Vice President Al Gore and Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, debated along with other Pentagon officials changing the ban.

Powell, as the president's chief military adviser, argued for keeping the ban in place. "Homo[sexuality] is a problem for us," he said, according to the handwritten notes. He pointed out that "sodomy" was banned by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. An "absolute right to privacy" for soldiers in such close quarters, Powell said, "simply does not exist."

He also listed AIDS as a concern in the military's policy toward gays, and he said officers would have to decide whether they could force straight soldiers to live with gay soldiers if the policy was changed. He noted that after desegregation of the military, white soldiers could not object to rooming with black soldiers but that male and female soldiers could not live together.

The parents of young soldiers, Powell said, were also "concerned about forced association and immaturity of 18-year-old" service members.

Most notably, Powell rejected the suggestion that the debate over gays in the military was a civil rights issue. The "comparison with blacks," he said, "is off-base" because race is a "benign characteristic."

A starred section of the notes indicates Powell's possible contribution to history: A "possible solution," he said, was that "we stop asking."

After much debate and dissent, that would be the policy of the United States for the next 18 years. Ultimately, it was a Democratic president that the Republican Powell endorsed who succeeded in persuading Congress to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military for the first time.

Powell told Politico in an email on Friday that he wanted Clinton to hear the views of the military in the meeting and noted that "the real issue was congressional opposition" at the time.

On the question of whether the debate was a civil rights issue, Powell wrote:

“I did not think they were equivalent; although both were discriminatory. The armed force[s] to do their job have to do things that are discriminatory, e.g. capital punishment for walking off the job.”

Powell now supports the policy of allowing gays to serve openly, and he said in 2012 that he no objections to same-sex marriage.

In the meeting, other military leaders voiced opposition to changing the clear-cut ban, while Gore spoke up for a view that would become largely undisputed over the next 20 years: Being gay was not a choice, but according to science, it was a "predisposition" for most.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-awkward-clinton-era-debate-over-dont-ask-dont-tell/381374/

mockeryd:

I AM SORRY BABY HUMAN! DO NOT CRY ANYMORE! i SHALL BRING YOU MORE TOYS

[video]

by Jazmine Hughes

I've already told you how nosy I am, so projects that answer "how X does Y" fascinate me. Also, I really like pictures of kids. Accordingly, probably just for me and no one else, the New York Times published a feature on what kids around the world eat for breakfast, launching a minor investigation into the nature/nurture dyad of how we categorize foods into "appropriate" meals. Breakfast-for-dinner, or brenner, according to my friend Brenner, always feels like an indulgence, though it's just a delay of food "normally" consumed ten hours prior, whereas dinner-for-breakfast feels backward and disruptive. Why have we set up these arbitrary food barriers for ourselves? Who's to say that fermented soybeans (or natto, a breakfast dish in Tokyo) aren't a delicious meal for any time of the day?

The article opens with a hot take: "Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast"— which, ok, is totally true— but moves on to assert that a widespread change in taste preferences can happen ridiculously early, if we try:

Parents who want their kids to accept more adventurous breakfasts would be wise to choose such morning fare for themselves. Children begin to acquire a taste for pickled egg or fermented lentils early — in the womb, even. Compounds from the foods a pregnant woman eats travel through the amniotic fluid to her baby. After birth, babies prefer the foods they were exposed to in utero, a phenomenon scientists call “prenatal flavor learning.” Even so, just because children are primed to like something doesn’t mean the first experience of it on their tongues will be pleasant. For many Korean kids, breakfast includes kimchi, cabbage leaves or other vegetables fermented with red chile peppers and garlic. A child’s first taste of kimchi is something of a rite of passage, one captured in dozens of YouTube videos featuring chubby-faced toddlers grabbing at their tongues and occasionally weeping.

I texted my mom to ask what she ate when she was pregnant with me; she was a 25-year-old nurse, and it was her first pregnancy, so I figured she consumed only a healthy cocktail of fruits, veggies, and fairy dust. Wrong: "I ate Ruffles potato chips, Lincoln apple juice IN THE BOTTLE, pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese, and vanilla shakes from Alpha Delta Pizza. And lots of gum." Imagine me scratching at my tongue and crying.

13 Comments

New tensions erupted in St. Louis on Wednesday evening after an off-duty police officer shot and killed Vonderrit Myers Jr, an 18-year-old African American man. The officer, who has not been named, was working at his second job as a security guard but was still wearing his police uniform when the incident occurred.

Teyonna Myers, the victim's cousin, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "He was unarmed. He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again."

St. Louis Police offered a different series of events. Chief Sam Dotson told the Associated Press the officer was spotted by three men while patrolling his designated security guard area in his car, and after one of the men ran away, the officer made a U-turn. This prompted all three to run away, with the officer tailing them in his car. The chase escalated as the officer got out of his vehicle and pursued one man on foot. Chief Dotson noted that because the teen was grabbing his waistband as he ran, the officer believed he was carrying a weapon.

"An investigation will decide if the officer's behavior was appropriate," said Chief Dotson, who did not offer an explanation for the seemingly excessive 17 shots. Police officers are generally trained to shoot to kill in situations where they feel their lives are threatened. As Jens David Ohlin, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, explained to me, there are two kinds of defensive force: "non-lethal measures and lethal measures. Once it is appropriate for the police officer to fire their weapon, you are in the territory of lethal measures and it is justified to kill the individual."

Many local residents drew parallels to the police shooting of Michael Brown, which took place in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, and the shooting of Kajieme Powell just a few days later. Protests of Myers death carried deep into the night and Thursday morning. The protests were predominantly peaceful, as no arrests were made or businesses looted, though some police car windows were broken in. (Dotson noted that police "showed great restraint" throughout the night.)

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/officer-shoots-and-kills-teen-in-st-louis/381274/

For years the biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus had been searching for a project that might establish his greatness, only to watch ideas come and go like love affairs, beginning with promise and ending in hurt feelings.

His whole career had been a recovery process, one attempt after another to start over. He’d been unceremoniously dumped by Harvard and forced to start his own laboratory in a converted garage. When Pincus met the feminist crusader Margaret Sanger in 1950 and she implored him to go to work on the development of a birth-control pill, he knew the project carried enormous risk. Such a pill would never work, other scientists had told Sanger. And even if it did work, how would one test such a thing? Who would dare manufacture it? Who would prescribe it? Thirty states and the federal government still had anti-birth control laws on the books.

Yet in many ways, the pill project was perfect for Pincus. It concerned the area of science he knew best: mammalian reproduction. And it required not only scientific knowledge but also an entrepreneurial spirit. But the best reason the project suited Pincus was that he had nothing to lose. As one of his colleagues put it: “He wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb because he didn’t have any limb.”

Years of disappointment had taught Pincus that it wasn’t always the science that determined an experiment’s success; it was often the forces surrounding the science, including public sentiment. Now that Pincus had settled roughly on the hormone progesterone as the key to his pill, he needed to build the team to do the scientific work, forge alliances with manufacturers, conduct his trials, and, if all went well, spread the news of the coming invention so that it might have a chance at acceptance.

He knew that his progestins (synthetic forms of progesterone) stopped ovulation in rabbits and rats. The next step was to test them on women. And to do that, he would have to add a player to his team—a doctor who could reassure patients they were safe and would convey to the drug companies supplying the drugs that no one would be harmed. There had never been a medicine made for healthy people before—and certainly not one that would be taken every day. The risks were enormous. Pincus settled on a physician named John Rock, a gynecologist respected by his peers and adored by his patients. Rock looked like a family physician from central casting in Hollywood: tall, slender, and silver-haired, with a gentle smile and a calm, deliberate manner. Even his name connoted strength, solidity, and reliability.

Rock had one more thing going for him: He was Catholic.

There is no mention of contraception in the Bible, Old Testament or New, nor did the term enter the vocabulary of Catholic moral theology until the second half of the twentieth century. Before then, the most relevant term used by theologians was onanisma, from the biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38:4–10), which was described as masturbation or sexual intercourse performed without the intention of reproduction. Sex was only for procreation, the Christian church declared, which made onanisma a sin.

The human reproductive system was poorly understood even in the early years of the twentieth century. Many people thought women were merely the vessels, and that the man’s seed sprung on its own into a baby. That’s why spilling seed, or losing semen, whether in sex or masturbation, was labeled a sin.

Still, the Catholic Church had no official position on birth control until 1930, when Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical called “Casti Connubii” (Latin for “Of Chaste Wedlock”). The pope acknowledged that birth control was widely used “even amongst the faithful,” although he wasn’t happy about it, and called this trend “a new and utterly perverse morality.” He added that it amounted to a “shameful and intrinsically vicious” attempt to get around the natural “power and purpose” of the conjugal act. The pope did, however, offer the faithful an important loophole: A married couple would not be sinning, he said, if the husband and wife knew that natural reasons prevented them from having children.

For decades doctors had been instructing women who did not wish to become pregnant to have sex only during their “safe periods.” Unfortunately for many women, until the 1930s most doctors believed the safe period came in the middle of the menstrual cycle; in fact, that’s the time when women are most likely to conceive. After scientists finally got it right, a Chicago family doctor named Leo J. Latz, a devout Roman Catholic, figured out how this information, combined with the pope’s recent declaration, offered men and women a shot at having guilt-free and baby-free sex at certain times of the month. Latz wrote an instruction manual that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

There was more than pleasure on the line. Women all over the world were desperate to control family size or better time the arrival of children—for the sake of their health and the welfare of their other children.

In the 1930s, birth rates for all American families fell to a low of 2.1 children per mother, in large part because of the Great Depression and in part because women—including Catholic women—became increasingly comfortable with the rhythm method and other forms of birth control. Priests, alarmed by the trend, took to their pulpits to attack birth control, but their sermons did little good. For the first time, many Catholics began compartmentalizing their beliefs. Sex became something private and apart from religion. It was the rumbling before a seismic shift.

John Rock had already gained a small measure of fame as the Catholic doctor who dared defy his church: He wanted young couples to talk about sex and babies before they married. He wanted them to understand that sex was neither shameful nor obscene. He wanted society to provide safe and effective means of birth control, and he wanted married couples to have the right to use them.

For all of this, Monsignor Francis W. Carney of Cleveland called the doctor a “moral rapist.” But Rock would not budge. It was no wonder Pincus liked him.

When Rock treated women for infertility, he would begin by taking a medical history and providing a complete physical exam. If the woman wasn’t menstruating, or if she wasn’t menstruating regularly, Rock might order an endometrial biopsy. Rock was unusual among fertility specialists at the time because he also asked husbands to have their semen tested. He was also unusual—if not unique—in that he operated a rhythm clinic down the hall from his infertility clinic to teach women how to better time their sexual activity to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Between the women seeking birth control and those patients who were trying to overcome infertility, Rock came to understand not only human reproduction but also a good deal about human relations. In the same day, he would see some women who were straining to raise more children than they could handle and others deeply wounded by their inability to get pregnant. Among the women with children, many came asking for the only thing they’d ever heard of that would guarantee an end to their baby-making days: a hysterectomy, or the removal of the uterus.

One such patient, known as Mrs. L. A., was 32 years old. She had married when she was 18, borne 11 children, and had one miscarriage. Her last five deliveries had been by Cesarean section, and her very last had been twins. She told Rock she and her husband had sex twice a month and never used birth control. The twins were only six months old when Mrs. L. A. visited Rock. She reported that her husband was trying to be “careful,” meaning that he was withdrawing before he ejaculated, to avoid getting her pregnant again. She told the doctor she was exhausted, in pain, and suffering occasional blackouts. Her periods were unusually profuse and painful. Rock suggested an immediate hysterectomy.

Meeting these women emboldened Rock. In the 1950s, every young adult woman seemed to be having children, or wanting to. Raising big families was an act of patriotism in postwar America. Men and women who couldn’t reproduce were pitied. Year after year in the 1950s, the nation became more fertile. By 1957, the average American woman would have 3.7 children in her lifetime.

Demand for fertility treatments exploded in the 1950s, but doctors offered little meaningful help. Beginning around 1950, Rock conducted a series of experiments on women struggling with what he called “unexplained infertility.” He suspected that some of the women were not conceiving because their reproductive systems were not fully developed. When a woman with such a condition did somehow become pregnant, the ensuing pregnancy helped her reproductive system mature. To test his theory, he recruited 80 “frustrated, but valiantly adventuresome” women for an experiment in which he would use hormones—progesterone and estrogen, the same hormones Pincus had been studying—to create “pseudo pregnancies.” He confessed to the women that he had no idea if it would work, but the women trusted him and went along.

He started the women on 50 milligrams of progesterone and five milligrams of estrogen and escalated gradually to 300 milligrams of progesterone and 30milligrams of estrogen. When the first round of treatments ended, no one was dead and no one had become seriously ill. That was good news. Within months, the news got better. Thirteen of the 80 women in Rock’s care became pregnant when they’d stopped taking the hormones. Rock told colleagues that the hormone-induced pseudo pregnancies seemed to have given their bodies a lift and helped them become fertile. Soon, his fellow gynecologists were calling it “The Rock Rebound.”

Only one serious problem had developed: The women taking the hormones were often convinced that they were pregnant because the hormones produced many of the same symptoms as pregnancy: the women became nauseated; their breasts grew larger and more tender; and they stopped menstruating. The women were heartbroken when Rock told them, no, they weren’t pregnant; the hormones were merely tricking their bodies and mimicking pregnancy.

When Pincus learned of Rock’s work, he was pleased but not surprised that the progesterone and estrogen were having a contraceptive effect. The important thing to Pincus was the plain fact that Rock’s patients were not dying. Here was proof that it was safe to give large doses of progestins to women.

Still, Rock told Pincus that his infertile patients were crushed to learn that their symptoms of pregnancy were mere mirages. Pincus offered an elegant solution—and one that would have enormous consequences for his own work and for the future of women around the world. He told Rock to have his patients stop taking the pills for five days each month. Their hormone levels would return to normal, their symptoms would ease, and they would have their periods.

Rock liked the idea. It would make the pill seem more natural, like a scientific version of the rhythm method.

Once that was settled, Pincus presented Rock with a proposal: Would Rock permit some of his patients to be the first human recipients of an oral birth-control pill? The women would take Pincus’s form of the pill, not Rock’s, and they would be studied carefully to make absolutely certain they were not ovulating during their pseudo pregnancies. If they still benefitted from Rock’s rebound, great. But that wasn’t the point. The point was proving Pincus’s pill would work as an effective contraceptive.

Rock agreed. Together, the men would go on to conduct tests in insane asylums and in the slums of Puerto Rico and Haiti. They would even try giving the pill to men. They knew the Catholic Church would object to their work, and they had no idea if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would approve an oral contraceptive, or if a manufacturer would agree to sell one.

But those were problems for another day.

---

This article has been excerpted from Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-team-that-invented-the-birth-control-pill/380684/

29-Year-Old Brittany Maynard was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer and told she has 6 months to live. Rather than waiting for the cancer to give her a painful death, she decided to take her life, and death, into her own hands. She explains in an article she wrote for CNN:

Because the rest of my body is young and healthy, I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind. I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that.

I did not want this nightmare scenario for my family, so I started researching death with dignity. It is an end-of-life option for mentally competent, terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live. It would enable me to use the medical practice of aid in dying: I could request and receive a prescription from a physician for medication that I could self-ingest to end my dying process if it becomes unbearable.

I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family.

More about Brittany and her choice can be found at the fund set up in her honor.

Alfonso Ribeiro finally pulls the “Carlton/Courteney Cox Dance” card.

“… The real trick to producing great work isn’t to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be.”

Nobody Knows What The Hell They Are Doing, by Oliver Burkeman

I just read an article that isn’t related specifically to logos, but it’s one of the better collections of words in favour of saying no when for-profit companies ask for free work.

“This isn’t just about unpaid labor. One reason people, especially young people with creative aspirations, work for free is to form valuable relationships that will push their careers forward. But you can’t form a valuable relationship with a rich person who can afford to but won’t pay you a reasonable wage, because your entire relationship with that rich person is based on their failure to acknowledge the value of the work you’re doing for them.”

Exactly.

Don’t work for free — or even cheap — for rich people.

A good read, via Steve Douglas.

There are over 900 recipes in this site’s archives, [which is completely nuts, but also conveniently gives me an answer to the ever-present "what do you do all day?" question besides my usual, "mess around on Instagram?"] and while I’m overwhelmingly quite fond of all of them, there are ones that nag at me not necessarily because they don’t work but because they’re not, in hindsight, the “best in category” I once found them to be. Among these are the chicken pot pies I made from Ina Garten’s beloved recipe six years ago, and somewhere, my friend Ang is gasping because these are, to date, her favorite thing I’ve ever made for dinner. But I always thought they could have been better for several persnickety reasons.

First, instead of braising the chicken in that delicious veloué sauce you’re making, Ina has us roast chicken breast until they’re fully cooked, cool them, dice them and then add them to the sauce. But why? I asked Ina, but my book didn’t answer. That’s not the only extra step. Vegetables such as carrots, peas and those persnickety pearl onions are each blanched for two minutes in water before being added to the pot pie base, which baffled me even then. Why not just cook them in that finger-licking stew, too, and let them drink up all that awesomeness? My third quibble with the recipe is that for four servings of pot pie, the soup part alone uses 12 tablespoons (that’s 3/4 cup or 170 grams; it does not include the additional cup of butter used for the four pastry lids) of butter, and guys, I think it’s been fairly well established, perhaps even 900 times, my fondness for butter, but this is just … I cannot. When I created my own anything-but-abstemious pot pie recipe a few years ago for my cookbook, my filling only need 3 1/2 tablespoons butter for four portions to give you a nice rich sauce. Finally, I’d found that the sauce didn’t thicken well but assumed I’d done something wrong. A scroll through the comments that have arrived since indicates that it’s not just me.

... Read the rest of better chicken pot pies on smittenkitchen.com

---

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to better chicken pot pies | 181 comments to date | see more: Fall, Photo, Poultry, Stew, Winter

by Robert Balkovich

There are few people working in standup that are more divisive than Kathy Griffin. It doesn’t stem from controversial remarks, like many other comedians in her peer group, so much as taste. People who love her think that she is tremendous. People who don’t like her think that she's a talentless hack. There is very little middle ground, and even though she recently become only the third woman ever to win the Grammy for Best Comedy Album, she typically does not get respect from the mainstream.

Griffin’s career has often been compared to that of the late-great Joan Rivers, however their styles of comedy are actually like fire and water. Rivers was an old-school comic, rattling off joke after joke, firing punch lines into the audience with the speed of a gatling gun. Griffin’s sets are usually devoid of punchlines, or setups, or anything that serves as a comfortable guidepost when watching comedy. She tells stories, often about celebrities and pop culture, and you're either in it with her or you're totally lost. The one thing their careers have had in common is the ebb and flow. They have both been down before, under the radar for years before popping up on a TV show or news story that catches the eye of the public again.

Griffin has been in a moderate upswing for the last few years, in the spotlight thanks to her near-constant release of specials and CDs (like Rivers she also never turns down a job as long as it meets her fee), and highly publicized TV specials, such as New Years Eve with Anderson Cooper. She's been in the news most recently when she went on record as saying she was told by a CBS executive that they were “not considering females at this time” when she inquired about putting her name in the running to take over when Craig Ferguson left the Late Late Show. According to her she responded to those allegations by telling the executive that the lack of females in late night was “embarrassing,” and that “women who represent half the population should hold half of such jobs.” The executive responded by telling her that women already had their own show: The Talk. CBS, of course, dismissed her claims as false.

These allegations, and Griffin’s public reporting of them, are nothing new. Late night TV has always been a man’s game, and Kathy Griffin has always been a whistle blower of sorts for the entertainment industry. She does this humorously in her standup act; often when she is given a list of words or topics she is not allowed to discuss by the venue or client, she responds by reading said list on stage. In the case of the CBS executive she’s clearly taking a more serious stand, even though she is more well known for making crude off-the-cuff remarks. Many of her detractors point to this as a reason that they can’t abide: she has something to say about everything, it’s not always “ha-ha” funny, and she doesn’t know when to shut up. What gets lost in this critique is that her inability to shut up also provides us an important glimpse about what goes on behind the scenes, and how censorship and misogyny influence the way we engage with media.

I listened to Griffin on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast recently and was floored, as I always am, at her intelligence, honesty, and bravery. On WTF she talked candidly about her conservative upbringing. She grew up outside of Chicago, raised by two “total Irish alcoholic” parents to whom Catholicism was not just a religion, but an infallible social structure. Griffin explains that she “grew up in that Catholic family of ‘don’t say anything, and even if you see proof of something you better deny it, because that’s how we roll.’” She glibly mentioned to Maron that her uncle was a priest who got “moved from parish to parish” before eventually dying of AIDS. She talked candidly about her oldest brother who was a pedophile, who had been abused himself by a coach, and who was friends with the man who had sexually abused Griffin when she was a child. “My theory is that because this guy was my brother’s bestie, I have often had a lot of fear and guilt about, is this something they were doing together for fun? Because my guess is, dudes like this find each other,” she said bluntly of their friendship. When Maron asked if her parents knew, she said yes, but then stipulated that they were in denial:

GRIFFIN: And when my father finally said to him later in life, ‘Kathleen is estranged from you because she believes you’re a pedophile, is that true?’ And my brother Ken said to my father, ‘I do what I do.’

MARON: That’s what he said…

GRIFFIN: OK, so to this day my beloved mother is like, ‘Well, that’s not an admission.’ Let me tell you something – do you have sex with kids?

MARON: No.

GRIFFIN: OK, so your answer isn’t, ‘I do what I do.’ OK? If you asked me, I would not say, ‘I do what I do,’ I would say, ‘Nope, I sure don’t.’

When Griffin first rose to prominence in the ‘90s as an actress and comedian she was, in some ways, the pinnacle of the “un-cool” girl. In her act she talked rapid fire about vapid subjects: friends, dating, celebrities, etc, but she didn’t have the edge of Janeane Garofalo, or the sexual brazenness of Margaret Cho. The only shtick she had was that she was willing to talk about anything with her audience. Her career lulled at the turn of the century, and mostly lay dormant until 2005, when her reality TV show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List premiered. Nine years later the show is remembered as a prototype for the avalanche of celebrity “candid” reality shows we’ve been inundated with, but unlike the Kardashians or Lindsay Lohan, My Life on the D-List had a near-perfect balance of reality and show. Griffin used every episode to create a character of herself, a hardworking comedian who valued success because it meant security, and fame because it meant success. Usually the episodes featured her contriving a publicity stunt of some sort with her eye-rolling assistants, and then executing it to mixed results. There was a lot on the show that was obviously staged, but the show as a whole was strangely authentic, even in its most put-on moments.

Her comical hunger for fame and wealth came from her middle-class upbringing, where nothing was taken for granted and every penny was put to good use. If you watched the show long enough it became clear that Griffin was not just a social climber, but an smart and successful businesswoman with an incredible work ethic. When she bemoaned her lack of respect as an actress and a comedian, she was both making fun of herself and projecting the unfair public image people have of her that she isn’t someone who deserves the mid-level career that she’s had. Those that watch carefully can see the self-awareness and intelligence behind the show, which won two well-deserved Emmy awards for “Outstanding Reality Program” during its run.

In the midst of the showbiz comedy there was also an intense personal and emotional current that ran through the show. Griffin did not just let viewers into a controlled version of her real life; she was often totally exposed on camera. In early seasons she experienced both a very painful divorce and the death of her father. Where other shows of its ilk would present these subjects in a dramatic and ultimately sympathetic manner, Griffin just told the truth. She sat in front of the cameras and cried, ugly, painful tears. She talked about being embarrassed to have realized that her husband probably never loved her, she revealed the immense pain she felt watching her mother, Maggie “Tip It” Griffin, the frequent butt of her jokes, trying to cope with the loss of her father. These moments peppered the show’s whole run. In an episode in a later season she is thrilled to get an acting gig on Law and Order, and then embarrassed to the point of tears when she gets on set and realizes that her usual funny shtick isn’t going to be enough to cut it. To this day I remember these moments, and I look back on My Life on the D-List as one of the very scant few reality TV shows that portrayed its subject honestly.

There is no vanity in those moments, and they certainly do nothing to help Griffin win over those who think she is immature and lacking in talent. Really, there is no glamour to anything she does, and even though it clearly pains her at times, she has never tried to change that. In her interview with Maron she tells him how she felt ostracized from his group of male comedian friends who all performed together at the time — Louis C.K., Nick DiPaolo, Dave Attell. She laughed about bombing nearly every show for five years straight, and Maron posits that Griffin was never really trying to be a standup in the way that he and the boys tried to be, she was doing something else. I think it is more complicated than that, but Maron is right. Griffin’s whole persona, from the standup, to relentlessly mocking celebrities, to My Life on the D-List, to coming out of meeting with executives and telling the public exactly what was said, is not about pleasing people by making them laugh, it’s Griffin’s form of rebellion.

In her interview with Maron she offhandedly calls herself a militant feminist. It seemed to me to be another one of her self-deprecating jokes at first, given that I know plenty of people who would trip over themselves coming up with things she has said to contradict that ascertain. But when we take a step back and really look at her work as a whole, it's all about rejecting the status quo, rejecting our accepted notions of what high or polite society is, raising our voices in dissent when something seems not right, no matter how unpopular it makes you. When we strip away our misogynist view of her career as a loud mouth bitch, and choose to see her instead as the Catholic girl who decided to not look the other way when she witnessed abuse, who grew up to be the woman who decided she wasn’t going to stay quiet in the face of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the entertainment industry no matter how many times the patriarchy has told her to shut up, militant feminist is actually a fitting description.

Robert Balkovich is an Oregonian-cum-New Yorker whose writing has appeared in/on The Airship Daily, 7 Stops Magazine, The Park Slope Reader, and TravelSquire.com. He is not from Portland. His other missives can be found @robertbalkovich.

0 Comments